What a great week for posts in the Armenian Blogosphere or perhaps, every week has been like that. Although there is rarely a common theme apart from the Genocide, there is at least diversity in a blogosphere that stretches from Yerevan to Los Angeles and elsewhere. The biggest problem is knowing where to begin, but perhaps Myrthe at Life Around Me deserves that privilege this week.

As most of us living here know, the Armenian healthcare system is a shambles. Corruption is endemic and the quality of care is appalling if it exists at all. According to the RA National Statistics Service, only one in three Armenians seek medical care when they need it. No wonder.

I met Vardan and his mom Seda again at the hospital today. They told me that at different occasions over the past six months or so, they both had their blood tested and their bloodgroup determined. Apparently, both times Seda had her blood tested, she had a different bloodgroup. It doesn’t stop there: The three times Vardan had his blood tested, each time he apparently had a different bloodgroup, one of them a bloodgroup that would have been genetically impossible considering the bloodgroups of his parents. This is a medical miracle indeed! A bloodgroup is not ever supposed to change. Not ever. A person has the same bloodgroup from the day he is born until his very last breath.

Over the years, I have heard many stories about the healthcare system in this country, but this is a definite low, no matter how many stories I have heard about people paying a bribe or being sent from one office to another and from one hospital to another. This is a definite low. This is happening in a country that still prides itself in having a relatively well-educated work force. This is not about poverty or about badly educated employees or lack of equipment. This is about pure negligence, sloppiness and carelessness, that could possibly put someone’s life in danger. Words just fail me….

As Myrthe is in Armenia, we might as well stay here and take a look at Nareg’s recent post on Cilicia.com’s Life in Armenia page. This week, Nareg laments the state of Armenian TV and notes that when one station translated Friends into Armenian they also changed the plot to keep in with societal norms. I wonder if they’re allowed to do that?

I know I’m being nasty, but this television channel has great potential and, indeed, to be quite fair, it has a few good shows, but, on the whole, it’s basically glamour, show biz and superficial nonsense. Their journalistic standards are ridiculously low… And then, they announce, they’re going to show “Friends”.

Well, well.

Dubbed. In Armenian.

[…]

Bad, folks. That’s the verdict. Very, very BAD. I mean, Ross makes his first appearance, looking very sad, proclaiming that his ex-wife just took the last thing that belonged to her after she moved out, and Joey says, in English, “How could you not know that she was lesbian ?”. The Armenian version, however, goes, “How come you didn’t know she had a boyfriend.

On a more serious note, one common theme always expressed on Armenian blogs is the Genocide. And as 24 April approaches I’d expect that to happen more and more. Until then, the continuing saga of the possible recalling of the U.S. Ambassador to Armenia is covered by a number of blogs. Alex at Life in Armenia posts an op-ed from the Los Angeles Times on the matter.

JOHN EVANS IS THE U.S. ambassador to Armenia, as of this writing. But he probably won’t be for long. Evans, a career diplomat who was selected to receive an American Foreign Service Assn. award last year for his frank public speaking, irked his superiors at the State Department by uttering the following words at UC Berkeley in February 2005: “I will today call it the Armenian genocide.” For that bit of truth-telling, Evans was forced to issue a clarification, then a correction, then to endure having his award rescinded under pressure from his bosses, and finally to face losing his job altogether. What happened in Armenia in 1915 is well known. The Ottoman Empire attempted to exterminate the Armenian population through slaughter and mass deportation. It finished half the job, killing about 1.2 million people. Yet the State Department has long avoided the word “genocide,” not out of any dispute over history but out of deference to Turkey, whose membership in NATO and location between Europe and Asia make it a strategic ally.

Former Peace Corps Volunteer Jeff at Voch Me Ban says that people should support Evans by sending letters and faxes to the U.S. State Department.

Moral outrage should not be reserved for one or two days a year. In February 2005, Ambassador John Evans had the courage and strength to stand up to the Turkish lobby (yes that includes you Mr. Livingston) and during a speech in California called the Armenian genocide - genocide.

This has caused a firestorm over the last year and now several newspapers are writing about rumors that Ambassador Evans may be recalled from his post. There was a great editorial in the LA Times today defending Evans.

It is important to commemorate the Armenian genocide on April 26th but we all have a moral obligation to stand up today, to stand up tomorrow, and to continue to stand up and defend Ambassador Evans for having the courage to speak the truth.

Related to this news is a report posted on Ara Manoogian’s Martuni or Bust blog that in the 1970s the U.S. and Turkish Governments worked together to block international recognition of the Armenian Genocide.

A series of formerly classified State Department cables, recently made available through the National Archives and Records Administration, provide first-hand insights into the cooperation during the early 1970s between the U.S. and Turkish governments seeking to block the recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the United Nations.

Coming back to more recent events, Tim Russo continues his excellent serialization of his memoirs detailing the time he spent working in Armenia for the National Democratic Institute (NDI). The chapters detailing the 1998 presidential elections that brought then Prime Minister Robert Kocharian are particularly interesting.

We pushed our way through the noisy crowd of TV cameras, journalists, and angry voters, and flashing our international observer badges to the police, obtained entry. Just inside the lobby, the voting area was set up, but voting had stopped some time ago.

It was pandemonium. Voters who’d been locked out were screaming, precinct officials were arguing, police were taking interviews, and the ballot box was standing on a table, perched atop several steps leading up from the lower area of the lobby, its seals obviously broken, and a policeman standing guard.

The woman who’d been hurt in the attack sat in a corner, sobbing and being consoled, her long day about to get a lot longer, the pain from a separated shoulder thrown in. A short, middle-aged woman, with short gray hair, looking very much the stereotypical eastern European mother, fairly bulky, she was explaining what had happened in between convulsions of crying. She wore the cheaply made clothes of a poor Armenian woman, who woke up this morning, looked in her closet for her Sunday best, trying to look her finest for election day, a sweater, a skirt, short heels, her neck wrapped in a scarf to keep her warm for the entire day she’d spent in an unheated school building. Her face was red with the combination of fear, shame, and prolonged weeping.

The pollworkers had seen the group of goons enter the polling place and head for the ballot box; a fast moving group of young men in black leather. Unlike the rest, she leapt into action. She was a Demirchian campaign proxy, an officially sanctioned partisan observer representing Karen Demirchian’s campaign. All through the day, the news of the chaos throughout the country kept coming in, and upon seeing the thugs move into her precinct, she reacted instinctively. Fearing the worst, she ran ahead of them and in futility threw herself onto the box, which was set on a table at the top of a few stairs in the lobby, as if to shield it. One of the men physically threw her off of the box, down the steps, and she had fallen, separating her shoulder. She was now crying in the corner, telling and re-telling what had happened.

After throwing her off of the box, the men then ripped open the ballot box, and tossed in wads of ballots, pushing and shoving precinct committee members who tried to stop them as they left, leaving complete chaos behind them. Compared with the most typical methods of vote rigging observed this day, which were fiendishly clever and insidious, this was a brutal, unsophisticated, and thuggish way to stuff ballots…but effective. The ballots were in there. Left behind in their wake was the messy and chaotic business of figuring out what had happened, and eventually, counting the votes.

“Why the hell would you send a bunch of goons to attack a ballot box and stuff it in broad daylight?” I asked Gegham amidst the pandemonium, in between interviews of witnesses.

The full post can be read here.

Word came in via mobile phones and messengers from outside that the results were beginning to become apparent. The incumbent, Kocharian, having been put in place by the coup, would lead following this first round, but would not have enough votes to avoid a second round, even despite the massive fraud undertaken to get him there. The second place candidate would be Demirchian, the candidate represented by the woman who’d been thrown from the ballot box, and would face the incumbent in a second round. The outcome of this precinct would not affect the ultimate result, but the issue of who might be behind the flagrant attack on the ballot box here looked certain to become an issue in the second round; a determination that could begin by looking at, and counting, the stuffed ballots. The stakes were raised. The room became hotter.

[…]

The stuffed ballots sat on top like trash or rotting meat might sit on top of a kitchen table; out of place, unwelcome, violating, a cancerous lesion lying upon the carefully cast ballots of fathers, daughters, grandmothers, grandchildren - democracy’s careful practice, defiled in an instant.

The mystery of the stuffed ballots’ origin was resolved rather quickly. The wads were removed carefully, so as not to reveal for whom they might have been cast, and set aside. Clearly visible, though, were the proxy signatures on the back of the ballots; these ballots were from this very precinct, the proxies in the room recognizing their signatures from yesterday’s preparations. Sometime between yesterday, when they were signed, and this morning when the ballots were opened for the voting, someone had delivered them from the locked safe to the culprits.

The chairman, a Kocharian appointee, had the only key to the school safe. The proxy signatures on the back of the ballots were a minor detail that may have escaped the chairman’s notice when he planned the fraud, a detail not so minor now. He started to look very, very nervous.

The full post can be read here.

The wads sat in piles of about ten or twenty, probably a few hundred of them. Carefully folded, as if they had been marked in succession, then stacked, evened out by banging them against the table, then folded, a perfectly aligned crease matching them together. Their ballot accountability coupons had been cut from the bottom of each ballot, and it looked as if the wads had been cut together, the frays of paper matched perfectly, signs of scissors struggling to go through a stack.

[…]

Now, the chair began to show his true colors. He steadfastly refused to call a vote on whether to count them as it was clear most of the members, even some of the ruling party members, would vote to count. The exhaustion of the group began to set in, and they began raising their voices. The chairman was sweating from the heat of the room, and the pressure of having had the most notorious act of election fraud occur at his precinct, probably with his complicity. Maybe when he agreed to provide the ballots he thought they’d be stuffed a bit less violently. Maybe he thought he was helping with a merry-go-round operation rather than something as messy as this.

Whatever the situation, the precint chair’s reckoning had come. But he held fast.

The full post can be read here.

The chairman carefully took the wadded ballots and unfolded them, revealing the candidate for whom they were marked; the incumbent Kocharian. Each and every one of them, marked with the same pen, same color ink, same type of “x” marked next to the incumbent’s name; 354 stuffed ballots. The secretary noted them separately in the protocol, not including them in the final tally of the precinct, and they were then seized by the police officer.

Gegham and I took our copy of the protocol and finally walked out of the empty school, the sun beginning to rise on the horizon. The deep silence of an early morning in late winter was everywhere. The sight of Hamo leaning against the front of the Volga, arms folded and smiling, was pure ecstasy.

“Let’s get outta here,” Gegham said as he walked briskly to the car. We threw ourselves into the car, exhausted, and drove off into the morning twilight.

The full post can be read here.

And talking of elections, Zara from Life Around Me is currently in Ukraine where she’s observing the parliamentary elections as part of a mission from the local Armenian It’s Your Choice NGO. Before she left she had this to say.

It’s even kind of funny but the Ukrainian Election code allows more falsifications than that of Armenia. They have a house-poll and absentee voting system and the immense part of fakes occurs mainly in this respect. Besides the counting process is not held by counting the ballots one by one, as is the case in Armenia, but filling the substance of the ballot box on a table and sorting them all together, and many ballots disappear or are changed during that mess. I can mention a row of suchlike cases, but even summing it up, Armenians are much more keen at elections, better to say at its falsification…

To end on a more pleasant note, Blogian posts a picture of Canada’s Miss Universe 2006. She is none other than Canadian-Armenian Alice Panikian. And talking of Armenians and the Diaspora, Glendale Chick says it’s s time that Armenians in the Diaspora buy products from the Republic when they are available.

I’m here to preach about Armenia. I’m here to talk about tomatos, cucumbers, preserves (anush), honey, wine, dried figs, dried apricots, and icecream. I know there are these information campaigns out there about not buying Turkish products. And I agree with them. But not buying Turkish products IS NOT AS IMPORTANT, as buying Armenian products.

A lot of times, our mothers and grandmothers have choices when they enter Armenian grocery stores. They have choices, but sometimes they just grab what’s on the shelf. We need to support exports from Armenia. We need to help support companies in Armenia. We need to help expand the number of products of Armenia on the shelves of Glendale stores. BUY ARMENIAN. I am asking each person who reads this blog to talk to their grocery store shoppers and go through the kitchen cabinets and refridgerators — and point out what could have been from Armenia? Why buy Turkish when you can buy Armenian?